Liberals must stop treating women, professionals, young people as the disposables

Forget the Liberal ‘heartland’, or the ‘jewels in the crown’ — there’s no crown left, and precious little heart.

Of the seats held by Liberal leaders since the party’s founding in 1944 through to the present day, only two — Malcolm Fraser’s old seat of Wannon and Scott Morrison’s old seat of Cook — are still in Liberal hands. A record low primary vote has seen the Liberal party all but wiped out in the nation’s cities, which are now a sea of red and teal.

Former senior Liberals’ seats like Bennelong, Pearce and Aston are now safe Labor. Others are firmly Teal, with most of these Climate 200-backed independents increasing their margins.

Seats that a few cycles ago were considered ‘key marginals’ like Corangamite, Eden-Monaro and Macquarie have locked in behind Labor.

One must always be cautious in pronouncing anything in politics dead, buried or cremated. Many a political obituary has been penned prematurely.

But this is, without a doubt, the lowest ebb for Australia’s centre-right party, raising real questions for its future and the future of our democracy.

The Liberals are at a crossroads. What does the party stand for? Are these values still relevant today? And if so, how can the various elements of party machinery — membership, candidate selection, campaign function and policy-making — be reinvigorated to make the party competitive in the modern electorate?

On paper, the values, are easy to find, and even a hardened Labor voter would be forced to admit they have enduring appeal in this country.

Freedom, toleration, equal opportunity, responsible economic management and free enterprise.

We can add, from Menzies’ and Howard’s long tenures as prime ministers, a certain respect for the electorate: a desire to communicate with them directly, and put the case for complexity when needed.

These values are not unique to the Liberals. Indeed, Labor’s Andrew Leigh has mounted a case for liberalism’s DNA in the Australian Labor Party. But those values do find a special resonance in the Liberal Party as the party of middle Australia, with no formal connection to any movement or industry.

Though the values endure, it’s harder to find much evidence of them in the incoherent approach taken to policy over the term in Parliament, and especially during the election campaign.

The past three years have been spent carving off sections of the electorate as disposable: women, professionals, Millennials and — due to a truly incomprehensible decision to go into an election with a policy position of higher income taxes than Labor — income earners of all levels.

A frequent error is the assumption that to appeal to these demographics, Liberals must change or compromise their values. Far from it.

Tax policies that encourage growth, housing policies that enable choice, immigration policies that contribute to Australia’s prosperity, and a disciplined approach to public spending that contains ballooning debt for the next generation should be bread-and-butter issues for Liberals. — and ones that can have cut-through with all demographics.

This is the first election in which Millennials and Gen Z have outnumbered the Baby Boomers. Professionals, women, and Australians from ethnically diverse backgrounds make up the seats the Liberals have lost across 2022 and 2025 and needed to win back to form government.

Instead, through a lack of policy vision, the Liberals essentially told large swathes of the electorate “we don’t need you… you are not our people.”

The trouble for the Liberal Party is there was no other constituency waiting to be plucked.

High ‘No’ votes in the Indigenous referendum were never a harbinger of some kind of working-class Trump-style realignment in outer suburban electorates, and 2025 proves this.

The country needs a functional Liberal Party to keep Labor accountable and speak up for the model of free-market liberal democracy that has made the modern world.

There is, no doubt, a strong case for Liberal renewal based on those values, rather than the hodgepodge Dutton presented to the electorate.

The Liberal Party’s review of the 2022 election, led by senior Senator Jane Hume and longtime strategist Brian Loughnane, said “many of the problems identified [in this review] have been constants for a decade or more.”

The review went on to make dozens of recommendations across the entire gamut of party machinery, including outreach to those Australians who had turned away from the Liberal Party — if not necessarily from Liberal values.

But any review into the 2025 election could no doubt be a copy and paste of previous reviews, with a few figures and seat names changed.

So, if the 2022 election did not provide the burning platform for necessary renewal, it is fair to ask whether anything can — or whether the Liberal Party of Australia is a spent force.

Trisha Jha is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Independent Studies.